FEW MODERNISMS seem "later" than that of visionary
Italian architect and designer CARLO SCARPA (1906-1978). In buildings,
objects, and museum interiors that are as richly detailed as they are
refined, as innovative as they are strange, Scarpa articulated a
modernism that is constantly elegizing itself, its grand gestalts
breaking down into jewel-like fragments alongside the styles and
structures of the past. Yet there is no pastiche in Scarpa's work,
only a devotion to material truth--a truth that is always historical as
well as phenomenological, allusive as well as immanent--and this verity
is perhaps one reason that Scarpa's work has proven such a fertile
resource for artists now. On the occasion of the exhibition
"Venetian Glass by Carlo Scarpa: The Venini Company.
1932-1947"--opening this month at New York's Metropolitan
Museum of Art--artists JOSIAH McELHENY, NICK MAUSS, CAROL BOVE, and KEN
OKIISHI consider Scarpa's enterprise and its significance across
myriad disciplines today.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

JOSIAH McELHENY

IN 2011, a modest space in Venice designed by the celebrated
architect Carlo Scarpa was designated a public monument and museum. It
was an unlikely candidate for elevation to canonical status: A
street-level commercial showroom on San Marco Square, commissioned by
the Italian manufacturer Olivetti in 1957, the space was filled with
typewriters displayed on an assortment of custom pedestals, stairs,
cantilevers, shelves, niches, and floating planes. With its lyrical
square window peeking out onto a side street and an elegant storefront,
displaying just three perfectly curvilinear machines, the showroom is
not centered around the organization of space but on the human-scale
objects contained therein.

Few architects of the postwar period were interested in small-scale
ideas; at most, they designed furniture as accents to their spaces. But
from his extensive work with the Venini glass factory on the island of
Murano in the Venetian lagoon to the intricate metalwork and joints of
his canal bridge for the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, Scarpa
was as passionate about the diminutive as he was about the spaces he
created and the views they framed. His work with Venini, in particular,
demonstrates his dedication to architectural ideas expressed in things:
For over a decade he worked directly on the factory floor with the
glassmakers and was paid only a day rate. The tabletop-size glass
objects he made there comprise a diverse exploration of strange material
effects and surprising historical borrowings. A number of his most
famous vase forms are derived from antique Chinese porcelain, but
because of the luminous effect of their batutto ("hammered")
surfaces--created through a laborious engraving technique that he
largely pioneered--they seem utterly twentieth century. Scarpa's
ideas oscillated between the ancient and the futuristic, as in his
somewhat disturbing granulare bowls, which look almost diseased--the
result of his insistence on using two fundamentally incompatible glasses
of very different hardness--or the corroso pieces, which have almost
fleshlike, sculpted surfaces and are among the best of his works in any
scale. These glass vases, bowls, and plates were typically produced in
very small numbers and displayed on elaborate, architectural-sculptural
constructions he made as showpieces for the factory to display at
exhibitions such as the Milan Triennale; they were produced not so much
to be sold as to demonstrate the capacity of the traditional factory
culture to adapt to modernism.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Scarpa might, in fact, best be understood as a vitrine architect:
He not only framed objects and interior vistas, but created works that
are meditations on scale and the process of looking itself, as can be
seen in the 1957 Gipsoteca, which functions as a kind of
vitrine-within-a-vitrine, as part of the Museo Canova in Possagno,
Italy. A tour de force of both architecture and exhibition design, the
museum extension contains small plaster models of sculptures by Antonio
Canova, as well as some of the artist's life-size Neoclassical
figures. The artworks are incorporated into a scheme of quasi-figurative
display cases whose graphic framing, emphasis on dramatic reveals, and
transparency are echoed in the design of the corners and windows of the
building itself. In the Gipsoteca, as in many of Scarpa's best
spaces, a visitor is prompted to reconsider the scale of his or her body
again and again, in this case through a nested series of frames: the
building, the full-scale figures, the vitrines, and the scaled figures
within.

Scarpa's delicate articulation of the ways in which display
can unfold our experience of objects proposes a more contingent and
physical idea of architecture: contingent in that display is inherently
impermanent (evinced in the current obsolescence of a typewriter
showroom), and physical in its demonstration that while architecture can
be scaled both up and down, the only real space is that which can be
measured against our own bodies. While modernism often trafficked in the
architecture of the imaginary, Scarpa's architecture of the
temporary and the material is the one in which we will always live.

JOSIAH MCELHENY IS AN ARTIST BASED IN NEW YORK.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

NICK MAUSS

CARLO SCARPA'S WORKS are permeated by a certain attentive
empathy toward objects, materials, and artworks. This feeling
materializes in real but irrational apertures, thought vectors, and
processional spaces gauzily layered in the mind--so that architecture
becomes a garland unraveling, rather than a discipline governed by
exigencies of production or consumption. With its Venn-diagram display
windows, the pressed-concrete facade of the former Gavina furniture
showroom in Bologna, Italy, for example, breaks radically with the
centuries-old house it invades, while paying homage through difference.
Ground down to softness by four hundred years of friction, the original
stairs of the Querini Stampalia in Venice are sectionally clad in new
marble slabs that appear to have been simply laid over and against the
worn-out treads and rises. Strangely delicate, even halting, this
alteration seems to want as much to protect the original form as to draw
attention, through open margins and slits in the slabs, to the
accumulated traces of past ascensions. Feeling the tension of both
upward motion and declension, you realize that Scarpa has invented an
apparatus that coaxes out both diachronic and synchronic experience,
rendering the transition between them nearly painful.

Scarpa's work is a text structured by the intricacies of its
combinatory units and internal links, drawing the eye (and its body)
toward points of contact and giving rise to spiraling thoughts about how
the whole thing holds together. As the incomprehensible system opens
up--this synthesizing of fragments from the future with fragments from
the past--you are suddenly flowered by the question of whether a
particular element is functional or ornamental, or whether a separation
between these modes even matters. Indeed, I often find it difficult to
give names to the things Scarpa has designed, as if he had drawn them
into a new sense and invented them for a purpose beyond practicality or
knowledge. Walking through Scarpa's sensitive interventions at the
Museo Correr or the Accademia in Venice has its parallel in the
experience of reading Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji:
extraordinary slowness, partiality, flicker, and the constant surprise
of poetry, strung through the sense of transience or mono no aware, the
pathos of objects.

Passages of emptiness--but there is no such thing as emptiness in
Scarpa's work--constitute another aspect of his alienation
techniques. The emptiness suggests breathing, digression, and new
sensorial knowledge. In his display ensembles for artworks, he
stubbornly pursued the perfection of each object as a dialogic fragment.
Every work and artifact was intended to be encountered as a continually
unfolding discovery with aesthetic conditions, demands, inclinations.
Scarpa silently brushed aside dull, equivocal assumptions about audience
and pedagogy and inherited museum constructs, wondering instead how a
picture by, say, Antonello da Messina should be tilted away from the
wall if it were to be approached through a long enfilade with a view of
a piazza.

What kind of public did Scarpa imagine? With all of his work, you
have to answer this question backward, or through inversion. Drawings
for some of his museum designs--in addition to the specific presentation
conceptualized for each artwork via devices designed directly for, to,
or against it--also feature a stylized fantasy figure. This wispy
Felliniesque proxy stands in for the observer but is so wildly out of
sync with the devotional rigor of the rest of the plan that one is left
to wonder how Scarpa imagined the body of the viewer in relation to
these scrupulously articulated correspondences among objects, planes,
patina, scale, color, and pose. In that sense, Scarpa's project is
akin to that of a jeweler, whose work is a process of translation that
relates a precious stone to a fantasized body--and to gravity, to
motion, to time. The work of interpretation in Scarpa's displays is
so nautilus-like, spiraling, and complex that the events he creates can
be inexplicably jarring. It is almost as if the spaces and objects are
thrown into empathetic interrelationships--and the viewer moves among
these scenes as an interpolator. The welded armature that holds a bronze
bust of a man aloft shocks in its intimate revelation of the cognitive
struggle as inchoate thought brought to a point of clarity. Scarpa asks,
What is required to make the thing visible, sensible? What are the right
clamps, poles, and easels to dynamize, isolate, cradle, and understand
the work, to thrust it into new thoughts? Scarpa's display devices
are site-specific, but, more important, they are neces-sitated--even
commanded--by the objects they raise, tilt, pivot, suspend in a volume
of air, dreaming backward from the object, upside down.

NICK MAUSS IS AN ARTIST WHO LIVES IN NEW YORK.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

CAROL BOVE

"DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW." I just
figured out what British occultist Aleister Crowley meant by that:
It's a twentieth-century, Western definition of dharma. Crowley
doesn't mean "Do whatever you want"--he's telling
you to discover what he termed true will, a kind of purpose that
transcends the ego and brings the individual into harmony with nature
and the universe.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The discovery about Crowley and dharma eventually led me to wonder,
What is the true will of an I beam? I found important clues in Guido
Beltramini and Italo Zannier's 2007 book Carlo Scarpa: Architecture
and Design, where there's an image of a Scarpa-designed apartment
building in Vicenza, Italy, completed posthumously in 1979. The
horizontall beams running between the main volume of the building and
the concrete pillars beneath are used as both decorative accents and
structural elements. Of course, an I beam is strong, and strength is a
property that Scarpa emphasizes. He also discloses the hidden forms of
the I beam--welding some beams together flange-to-flange, cutting
through them, capping them, situating them so that they form a compound
construction that echoes the nesting motif visible in the concrete
components of the building. The revealed forms are not simply what an I
beam can be coaxed into doing. These forms already exist in the
implicate order of I beams.

I beams and steel construction, late-nineteenth-century
innovations, were too new to have accumulated significant stylistic or
tectonic traditions by the time Scarpa began designing with them. That
didn't prejudice him against them (he cared about the past but
wasn't in thrall to it); it merely limited his handling of these
structures to a shallow frame of reference: the roughly one hundred
years from decadent Jugendstil to high International Style. He had a
modern outlook that was retrospective at the same time.

Historical layering is one of the most obvious features of
Scarpa's renovations of historical buildings and of his exhibition
designs, but such layering is visible in buildings he designed from
scratch as well. Consider the bronze hardware he used for the Brion Tomb
and Sanctuary, commissioned in 1969 for a cemetery in the hamlet of San
Vito d'Altivole, Italy. Here as elsewhere, Scarpa's
application of materials is satisfying in its precision. The keyholes,
the articulated frames around the open doorways, the window hinges, and
the fittings for a small exquisite alabaster container, to name a few
examples, beg for close inspection. Bronze has a certain color, texture,
hardness, and workability, and you can sense his nuanced responsiveness
to each of these qualities. His designs developed out of a dialogue with
craftsmen who were recipients of knowledge passed down for
centuries--his choices were informed by their practical experience.

The modernist ethos of "truth to materials" was a kind of
aesthetic empiricism and a corollary of the scientific method.
Scarpa's attunement to the true will of glass, concrete, or metal
was different. Venice, his childhood home, protected him from the
illusion that any aesthetic or structure, no matter how innovative or
progressive or functional, could be wholly determined by material alone
or could extract itself from history: The past was too ever-present and
the craft traditions were too deep. The mastery of procedural knowledge,
the savoir faire that's transmitted by every link in a chain of
experts and apprentices stretching back through the Renaissance and into
antiquity, is part of Scarpa's bronze. There is no overt reference
to the past, none of the lugubrious historicism that one might expect in
a grand mausoleum. But at the same time, when you look at the Brion
monument's metallurgy, you understand that bronze has been in our
hands for thousands of years and has developed innumerable sympathies:
Design is the manifestation of ideology, and bronze has taken
innumerable shapes over the millennia and has been invested with
innumerable systems of belief.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

As you make your way among the tomb's pavilions and monuments,
the details (fittings, trims, a wide range of inlays), many of them at
the scale of jewelry, are so seductive, so freely available to the
touch. When I visited, I was moved by the fact that the ceremony of
passage into the monument is free of any interference from ticket takers
or guards, or even signage--the transition takes place internally, as
you psychologically adjust to the environment. Brion shocked me with its
effulgence. It has so many motifs, many of them unique rather than
repeated. Where are the refrains? Where is the restraint? lam wary of
needless invention--yet here the effect was so intelligent. Brion said
to me, so convincingly: To be disciplined does not necessarily mean to
be parsimonious.

CAROL BOVE IS AN ARTIST BASED IN NEW YORK.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

KEN OKIISHI

A STRANGE TECHNOLOGICAL RUPTURE occurs as one proceeds through the
Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy. In line with contemporary
educational efforts, the museum has installed a computer screen that,
prompted by an awkward touchscreen mounted below it, displays images of
Carlo Scarpa's ravishing, intensely overlaid drawings of the design
for the building compound's 1958-75 renovation and newly conceived
and realized exhibition display. This, in itself, wouldn't be
particularly jarring, but the ad hoc placement of a surveillance monitor
next to the first screen, showing deliriously oversaturated live feeds
from throughout the museum, provokes a sudden sense of confusion as to
why this ghastly thing has happened so visibly in one of the
world's most thoughtfully executed museum architectures,
interrupting the invigoratingly complex flows through these buildings. A
completely unexpected series of thoughts follows--it feels a bit like
when an Internet signal suddenly appears and your phone beeps in the
middle of a forest.

I'm guessing the awkward proximity of these two monitors has
to do with the practicalities of minimizing the intrusion of network
cables within the original building structure. But its effect on the
viewer--here, marvelously sensitized to the interactions of color, form,
weight, diagram, space, and artworks, all simultaneously suspended in
multiple discursive and formal fields--is to throw the basic physical
experience of walking and seeing into crisis.

Exiting the room after this screenal breach, I stood at the
threshold of the outdoor passageway that connects the two main museum
buildings. (By chance, I happened to visit during Verona's Bacanal
del Gnoco, when the entire city is thrown into a wildly transhistorical
costumed frenzy. The sounds of reveling teenagers, who looked like a
thousand different castings of a neorave Romeo and Juliet, ricocheted
through the museum's palimpsest of materials and surfaces.)
Standing at that point, where the castle complex is punctured by the
grand arch bridge (the longest in the world at the time of its
completion in the 1350s, it was destroyed in World War II and
reconstructed directly after), you are confronted with a literally
folded space. As you descend through substructures of the bridge onto
various stairways and landings, any sense of the horizon or street level
in relation to the rest of the city is multiplied beyond recognition.
Gazing out onto the equestrian statue of Cangrande I della Scala for the
second time (the first having been from below), I was struck by how
perfectly bizarre its placement seemed--horse and rider half looking
away, hovering above garden courtyard, bridge, and other irrational
concrete precipices. As the river started to become visible through the
original castle archways, and as I glided across the suspended walkways
amid more crisscrossing, floating walkways of inscrutable origin and
destination, I realized how absolutely primitive digital screens can
look when set in the same material field as Scarpa's remarkably
advanced display apparatuses and used, no less, as vehicles for his
plans for these very structures.

Institutional buildings today (and I hesitate to use the term
architecture here, since most of what we live with is not) could be said
to present a similarly strange fission of materials and technological
interfaces. As has been the case for the past twenty or so years, these
structures are designed almost exclusively on computer screens--deemed
more efficient platforms for the mediation of construction and code. But
as this digitization has mixed with increasing financialization,
"architecture" is now commonly seen as the whittled-down sum
of grossly general components: the building's "skin," its
atrium, and the general path of circulation dictated by its
plan--nothing more. Beyond that framework, detailing is frequently
outsourced, and spaces of use are often conceived according to a
hierarchy of access to "views" and "naming
opportunities." Not surprisingly, the first question most "end
users" ask upon entering any structure, public or private, is:
"Do you have WiFi?"

The primary network for Scarpa--both as metaphor and as
material--is water. As he would have said, in his peculiarly flat-footed
and practical way, this is probably because he was Venetian. But
thirty-five years after Scarpa's death, the meaning of "being
Venetian" in an era when increases in sea level carry apocalyptic
portent pierces the core of urgent ideological and formal questions as
to how we build in the world. Scarpa's approach to water, if it can
be generalized, was to open the built structure to the unpredictable
forces of nature, and then to make that porosity into the basis of
decoration--a kind of ornament that seems to emerge naturally, but also
by surprise, like a barnacle. Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright, whom the
Italian architect glossed in his own work and discussed in detail in
idiosyncratic lectures to his students, Scarpa designed his structures
not for the tops of waterfalls but for the bottoms of canals.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Scarpa sought to explore "the way" or "the
path"--as in traditional Chinese and Japanese landscape painting,
and specifically, given the Venetian architect's particular
fascinations, in the movement of the mind/body through Shinto temple
shrine complexes--and invited such forces to invade the Cartesian space
of Western architecture. In his complicated and often tortured
relationship to traditional Japanese architecture, he fermented gaps of
not-knowing into ornate and often cryptically irrational adornments and
structural elements. It can sometimes be difficult, for example, to
figure out how to open a door designed by Scarpa: The hinge is given so
much manufactural intensity that the eye/hand misses the subdued,
frequently recessed apparatus that actually opens the portal.

And this zany quality to Scarpa's work always hits in the
middle of a total bliss-out. The poetry that emerges in his built
structures, like that of his drawings, cuts many ways at once. But now,
in an age of flat buildings and overly pedagogical exhibition design, it
is Scarpa's wild sense of humor that speaks most critically.
Architecture, in the twenty-first century--at a time when space in
institutional buildings is overwhelmingly determined by xXxtreme
branding opportunities and by the bodies that fill these structures as
props for half-baked, neo-Taylorist ideas--is once again in an
ideological and technological stranglehold (google "skip-stop
elevator" if you don't know what I'm talking about). Our
hypercapitalist cathedrals of wanting produce even more coldness and
cruelty than the state socialist architecture against which (however
unwittingly) Scarpa's vision emerged as a counter-force. And yet,
in that special way in which architecture can skip across time,
Scarpa's forms and material processes have the potential to shatter
all of this.

KEN OKIISHI IS AN ARTIST BASED IN NEW YORK.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"Venetian Glass by Carlo Scarpa: The Venlizi Company,
1932-1947," curated by Nicholas Cullinan, is on view at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from Nov. 4,2013-March 2,2014; the
exhibition is an adaptation of "Carlo Scarpa: Venini
1932-1947," curated by Marino Barovier for the Fondazione Giorgio
Cini and Pentagram Stiftung, on view at Le Stanze del Vetro, Venice,
last year.

JOSIAH MCELHENY, NICK MAUSS, CAROL BOVE, AND KEN OKIISHI ON THE
WORK OF CARLO SCARPA

COPYRIGHT 2013 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.